Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 434 ｜ The Women Against Trans Activism

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Today I am talking to Dr. Kathleen Stock. She is a professor

00:00:16.220 from the UK. She is a feminist. She is a progressive in many senses of the word and she has been

00:00:21.740 pushing back against this so-called gender identity movement. She's got a very interesting

00:00:26.640 perspective on this. Obviously, she and I are coming from two different places in our opposition

00:00:32.920 to kind of what we see as the eraser of women and biological categories. I've got the Christian

00:00:38.960 conservative worldview and she has a different perspective and a different angle, which I think

00:00:45.240 is so valuable and adds a lot to our understanding of the subject to be able to understand it from

00:00:53.340 every different perspective. So I'm really, really excited for you to hear this conversation.

00:00:58.260 Without further ado, here is Dr. Kathleen Stock.

00:01:06.700 Dr. Stock, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

00:01:12.800 My name is Kathleen Stock. I'm a professor of philosophy at a British university called the

00:01:18.700 University of Sussex. And I've recently, in the last two years, I've started writing about sex

00:01:26.040 and gender, sex in the sense of biology and gender and this thing called gender identity,

00:01:33.220 which is a increasingly common, popular concept. So I've got a book coming out called Material Girls,

00:01:41.560 Why Reality Matters for Feminism, where I take on this idea of gender identity

00:01:46.780 and say that there's both some philosophical problems with it and some practical problems with

00:01:52.280 it that mainly impact on women and children. Let's start with the philosophical problems

00:01:57.320 with it. I think you and I are probably coming from, from what I can tell, two kind of different

00:02:03.260 perspectives. We both see some similar problems with the gender identity movement. I'm a conservative

00:02:09.320 Christian, so I kind of have that perspective. You're coming at it from a different angle. So in your

00:02:14.800 opinion, what are the philosophical problems with the gender identity movement?

00:02:20.880 Okay, yeah. So I'm coming at it from, I'm gay myself. And I think I'm broadly speaking on the left,

00:02:28.000 although there's very many different versions of the left, and I'm certainly not on board with all of

00:02:32.240 them. So philosophically speaking, so gender identity is, we are told, a kind of psychological fact

00:02:41.020 about you that's invisible, that potentially anyway, may not be perceived by anyone else. It's detached

00:02:49.480 from the way you dress, what you wear, how you modify your body. It's a feeling in your head. And

00:02:57.480 that in itself is problematic when gender identity is the thing that we're being told is supposed to get

00:03:04.640 us access into certain spaces or access to certain resources. There's also additional problems around,

00:03:14.400 well, there's a huge number of problems, as you can imagine, where gender identity is being

00:03:19.200 prioritized over material facts about biological sex. Because as a society, we organize a lot of things

00:03:28.940 around biological sex quite reasonably. And the modern trans activist movement says that we should

00:03:36.280 deprioritize sex, and we should prioritize this invisible feeling as the criteria, politically and

00:03:45.000 socially. So I can go into the many different areas where that causes problems, if you'd like.

00:03:51.440 Yeah, we can definitely do that. First, I'm curious to hear, in your opinion,

00:03:55.180 how you think we got here. It seems like we kind of accelerated this conversation about women's

00:04:02.420 rights and recognizing the equal dignity of women into where we are now, which is basically that we

00:04:09.320 can't define a woman without being called a bigot, and we can no longer have sex-protected spaces.

00:04:15.940 How did this happen? It seems like just in the last few years, or was I just not paying attention

00:04:20.540 before? Well, it may be that you weren't paying attention, but I think a lot of it has gone under

00:04:26.920 the radar. So I think the ground was softened up in the 20th century, partly through certain academic

00:04:34.760 movements, which I think are really regrettable. So for instance, within feminism, there was a move to

00:04:43.780 say that womanhood was some kind of social status, and not a biological fact. So womanhood was not

00:04:51.880 adult human femalehood, but something social, some kind of social presentation. And they did that

00:04:58.200 because they thought it would help avoid this problem, political problem of what's called biological

00:05:06.160 determinism, the idea that what your sex determines where you should be in life, and that women should be

00:05:11.360 in the home looking after children, and not be in the universities being educated or whatever. So

00:05:17.260 the cunning move, the cunning plan on the part of some 20th century feminists was to say,

00:05:24.060 ah, well, biological determinism can't be true, because we're not biological beings. We're actually

00:05:29.140 social beings, and womanhood is just a social role. And that was a very regrettable move, because it

00:05:35.660 separated out, at least in some circles, womanhood from biology. Then there's another strand within

00:05:44.440 philosophy called post-structuralism, which thinks of pretty much everything as socially constructed,

00:05:51.040 linguistically constructed. So there's no prior fact about it, except what we say about it collectively.

00:05:57.620 And that's very popular in some areas of the humanities. And it's become exceptionally popular in

00:06:03.760 areas like gender studies and trans studies. So the academic stuff was softened, the ground was

00:06:09.980 softened up there. And yet another strain was, again, from the 20th century, some psychologists

00:06:16.520 working with people who are sometimes called intersex, but I would say they have differences of

00:06:22.840 sexual development, say, that's a better way of putting it, because they're not actually intersex.

00:06:27.120 So psychologists working in the 50s and 60s with children who had DSDs, differences of sexual

00:06:36.500 development, hypothesized this thing called a gender identity that they had that was a kind

00:06:42.500 of sex psychological role that was maybe at odds with the more ambiguous facts about their

00:06:47.500 bodies. And from there, it got extrapolated out to, we all have a gender identity. And moreover,

00:06:55.420 a gender, the new twist is that a gender identity is what makes you a woman or a man,

00:07:00.080 which is never what people were saying in the 1950s, or even in the 1970s. So that is the new bit.

00:07:16.620 There was a doctor in the United States, Dr. John Money, who also kind of developed that theory based on

00:07:24.340 sexual experiments that he performed on twin boys. I'm sure that you're familiar with all of this.

00:07:29.560 And obviously, that experiment did not end well. It did not prove his hypothesis. And yet,

00:07:36.360 even though that hypothesis of gender identity being this thing that, like you described so well,

00:07:42.800 is separate from our biology has lasted. Somehow it has endured and it has been latched onto. And now

00:07:51.300 it's not just defining our political conversation, but it's affecting very tangibly women's protection

00:07:57.700 and girls' sports and women's rights. So why do you think it is that even though it's really kind of

00:08:05.360 been this whole idea of gender identity being this intangible thing that people can just identify as

00:08:11.100 and think of, how do you think that it has endured for so long, even though we kind of debunked it a long

00:08:19.260 time ago? Well, it fits with a very powerful narrative, which we hear a lot in other circumstances,

00:08:26.060 which is like, you must realize who you really are, you must become the person you were born to be.

00:08:34.000 And that kind of, I would say, liberal kind of narrative fits very individualistic, very concerned

00:08:40.460 with freedom, freedom to be yourself and that, you know, whatever that means. That kind of rhetoric,

00:08:46.560 which we hear a lot and particularly from the States, if you don't mind me saying, fits very well

00:08:52.100 with expansive claims about gender identity. So, I mean, when I was researching this book,

00:08:59.020 I bought a lot of books for kids or teens, which had names like gender identity, discover who you

00:09:05.460 really are or find yourself. And of course it fits very well with capitalism because if there are more

00:09:13.560 than two gender identities, of course, once you've moved away from sex, you can have more than two,

00:09:17.520 you can have non-binary identities, you can have complicated sexual identities, then you can market

00:09:22.960 all those identities so you can make money out of them. So, I think that's also part of the story

00:09:28.460 here, which we shouldn't neglect. Certainly people are able to capitalize on what is now an industry,

00:09:35.500 especially for impressionable young people. When I think about kind of getting rid of these

00:09:43.520 biological categories, which we have recognized, I believe, for all of human history. I also, I mean,

00:09:49.860 I do think about the communist revolutions of the 20th century and what we read about in some of the

00:09:54.980 dystopian novels like Brave New World in 1984. It's not exactly that, but it does kind of speak to this

00:10:01.920 idea of kind of getting rid of any distinguishing factor about a person, making sure that everyone

00:10:09.700 just becomes this comrade and that we no longer have kind of inherent value according to our bodies

00:10:20.440 or according to who we are, according to our families, according to our value systems. We all just

00:10:26.880 become this amorphous blob that is controlled by the state. Now, that's coming from my conservative

00:10:33.380 perspective. And so, I do see the problem with this becoming an industry that capitalism loves.

00:10:40.700 And certainly, we see the big corporations like Amazon latching on to it. But I also see this as

00:10:46.800 reminiscent of things that we saw in the 20th century with, you know, communist and socialist and

00:10:52.780 even fascist totalitarian movements to take away what makes any individual special and just kind

00:10:58.980 of see them as agents of the state. Do you agree with that at all? Well, I mean, from what I've read

00:11:05.320 of the Chinese revolution and the Russian revolution, they certainly knew who the women were because they

00:11:11.180 had to keep having the babies and they didn't have as much power as the men. So, some things never

00:11:17.520 change as far as I'm concerned. Whether it's good or bad, there is a sex reality to our lives. And

00:11:23.760 we're a sexually dimorphic species. We reproduce by sexual reproduction, not asexually. We can't

00:11:31.020 technologically change those facts, although I think some people might be trying. But in the meantime,

00:11:37.600 there is a sex reality that has social effects. And what I think is true about the comparison you've made

00:11:46.700 is that in both cases, there's an attempt to control language, a very strong attempt to

00:11:52.660 control language. So, you know, modern transactivism cannot change the fact that there are males and

00:11:59.460 females. And there, I think, very likely always, well, there will, there will always be males and

00:12:05.200 females. They can't change that, but they can stop us talking about it. They can take any reference to

00:12:11.320 womanhood, for instance, out of the languages we're seeing in Britain. There's a move in

00:12:16.600 public policy to stop talking about women and to start talking about pregnant people or menstruators

00:12:22.880 or cervix havers. Of course, all those terms are incredibly biological as well. So, it's not,

00:12:29.080 but none of this is logical. Well, that makes sense. Right. That's one of the many contradictions

00:12:33.440 that I was hoping to talk to you about is that if I push back and say, for example, that, you know,

00:12:39.520 only a woman can give birth. What I hear from a trans activist is that, oh, well, you are reducing

00:12:46.060 women down to her, their capacity to give birth. What about women who can't give birth? Are you

00:12:49.900 saying that she's not a woman? Well, of course, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that

00:12:54.440 only people who give birth are women. I'm saying that only people who are the only women, you know

00:13:01.080 what I'm saying? I'm only saying that only women can give birth. But then they use terms like you just

00:13:06.540 said, like cervix haver or gestator, which is actually a lot more bioessential is what they

00:13:15.480 would say than me saying that only women can give birth. So, it's a little confusing to me.

00:13:20.560 Well, it's bad philosophy for a start. The whole premise on which it's based, the idea that in saying

00:13:26.940 only women can give birth, you're somehow reducing women to their biology or to their birthing function

00:13:34.220 is absolutely crazy. That is not how definitions work. I mean, you can also say, and I make this

00:13:39.200 point in the book, only bankers, or at least if you are a banker, you work in a bank, you know,

00:13:44.780 only bankers work in banks. But you're not saying that the most important thing about a banker is

00:13:50.760 that they work in a bank. You're not saying anything about what's important. You're basically classifying

00:13:55.300 some group of people for some explanatory purposes. And being a woman enters into all these different

00:14:01.280 causal relationships in the world, same as being a man does. And we need names to track those.

00:14:06.860 And then yes, of course, then replacing that language with things like menstruator and cervix

00:14:12.540 haver. Firstly, it's demeaning and dehumanizing. And secondly, it's very confusing to people who are

00:14:19.600 not university educated, who don't necessarily know the name for a cervix. So, it's incredibly middle

00:14:25.480 class. This whole movement is basically educated people playing around with language to make

00:14:30.180 themselves feel good, whilst not thinking about the consequences of what they're doing for people

00:14:35.000 who are less privileged than they are, I think. Right. And I would say that's true of things like

00:14:41.440 critical race theory and critical theory as well. These are all kind of academic theories that come

00:14:46.340 from a few people at the top. And then they try to apply what are just academic theories into politics

00:14:54.480 and into the real world. And I guess time tells whether or not the beach ball that is human nature

00:15:02.020 can sufficiently be pushed down forever or whether, like any beach ball, it's going to pop back up.

00:15:08.300 I think when it comes to gender, progressives or the people who are pushing this have just pushed too

00:15:15.920 far. I just don't think because of the reality that you articulated, there will always be male and

00:15:22.500 female. And biology is just not going to change in that way. There's going to be a pushback to this.

00:15:30.400 Whether or not you're on the right and the left, it's just an irrefutable truth in reality that people

00:15:36.080 aren't going to be able to escape. Do you have optimism in that direction that eventually this whole

00:15:40.900 kind of movement is going to fall apart because it's just not in alignment with what's real?

00:15:46.720 I don't know. I mean, it depends on the day, to be honest. And I think certain areas are more

00:15:55.140 open to movement than others. So for instance, what's happening to children and to teens, I think

00:16:04.020 cannot stand. We just need more information and more light being shed on actually what's happening,

00:16:11.960 which is children who are exploring their own identity. It's fair enough. We all have

00:16:18.040 aspects of identity. They're exploring their identity. Sometimes, you know, they will turn

00:16:23.240 out to be lesbians or gay children. That is being interpreted by the wider culture around them as

00:16:30.680 them being in the wrong body or them really, you know, a girl who is attracted to other girls

00:16:37.300 is interpreting herself as a boy who's attracted to girls, for instance. And then therapists around

00:16:44.460 them have all signed up to something which says that they can't argue with that. They have to

00:16:48.900 affirm this thing called their inner gender identity, which is described as if it's innate and it's just

00:16:54.700 sort of bursting out of them as if that could possibly be true. So, you know, when all that comes to light

00:17:00.580 and the medical consequences of that for children and that properly gets looked at responsibly,

00:17:06.420 then I think hopefully there'll be some push on that. But what I feel more depressed about is the

00:17:13.880 effect on women and the encroachments on and on adult lesbians, the encroachments on their rights,

00:17:21.180 their spaces, their resources, things that feminism over, you know, decades has fought hard for.

00:17:26.300 Grassroots feminism, not academic feminism. Grassroots feminism has fought hard for shelters,

00:17:33.980 domestic violence refuges, rape crisis centres, changing rooms, bathrooms, you know, you name it.

00:17:41.340 We've had to fight for it or others before me have fought for it. And it's being dismantled

00:17:46.040 now by this prioritisation of gender identity. So that's just not right. But on the other hand,

00:17:52.560 do people care enough?

00:17:56.300 I have a few questions within that. My first question to back up just a little bit is about

00:18:09.500 children. Now, one thing that I've seen that is troubling to me that I don't think is quite

00:18:15.020 mainstream, it was a viral tweet. And then it was also associated with the self-proclaimed communist

00:18:20.040 who hears who lives here in the United States, who wrote a book called Full Surrogacy. Now she is an

00:18:27.300 anti family. Yes, you might know exactly who I'm talking about. Of course, she believes in quote,

00:18:33.460 taking away the innocence of children. She believes that we all belong to each other, which again,

00:18:39.940 is very brave new world esque and that that will usher in this time of total egalitarian communism and

00:18:46.400 beauty and all of that great stuff. And there was another tweet, not by her, but someone who kind of

00:18:52.100 promotes her saying that children should be given puberty blockers without parental consent and paid

00:19:00.020 for by the state. So something that worries me, I trust parents to say, yes, look, I love my child. I

00:19:07.580 believe in the best interest of my child. I want to do what's best for my child. And being a 10 year old that

00:19:12.700 goes on puberty blockers is not best for my child. But if that kind of authority is removed, or is

00:19:19.120 questioned by the state or is replaced by the state, then I really do worry about protections for kids

00:19:25.520 who can't even, you know, make their own peanut butter and jelly sandwich yet. That is and I want to talk

00:19:30.880 about, you know, women's rights and feminism, too. But that really worries me about the disintegration of

00:19:38.400 parental rights and parental influence over a child's life in place of these activists and the

00:19:45.140 state who, quite frankly, do not have the best interest of children at heart. Is that something

00:19:50.020 is that something that concerns you as well? Well, I can. I'm very concerned about the unregulated

00:19:55.900 market for puberty blockers. I'm very concerned with surgeons advertising mastectomies, double

00:20:04.700 mastectomies to teenagers on TikTok. I'm very concerned about all of that. But I don't think I'm

00:20:10.300 as relaxed as you about parents. And this isn't because I blame parents or, you know, have some kind

00:20:17.340 of animus to what I am a parent. I know that there are parents who are uncomfortable with gender

00:20:26.360 nonconformity, or I would say sex nonconformity in their children. I know that there are parents who

00:20:31.260 are uncomfortable with the emerging homosexuality of their children, for whom, and these might be more

00:20:36.540 conservative parents, for whom it is preferable on some level that they maybe haven't properly thought

00:20:42.320 through. But it's preferable to have a daughter than a gay son or, and, you know, that seems to

00:20:49.900 be happening now. They're not getting there on their own, because there are educators, there are

00:20:54.560 academics, there's a whole infrastructure of LGBT lobbying groups, perversely, because you'd think

00:21:00.200 LGBT lobbying groups would be protecting gay children. But there's a whole mechanism now in place to

00:21:05.540 explain to parents that they might have a child in the wrong body or whatever. That's not, you know,

00:21:12.560 that doesn't involve any kind of wild radical communism that's happening now in relatively

00:21:18.520 mainstream places. Yeah. So I'm saying, I'm not saying you're wrong to worry about unregulated,

00:21:25.280 you know, children acting off their own bat. And it's true that in Britain, you can get puberty

00:21:29.560 blockers from Spain, you can bypass NHS regulation right now. But I'm also worried about the state

00:21:37.460 doing it. And I'm worried about parents doing it, because we've developed this cultural narrative

00:21:41.540 that this doesn't seem to be much pushback against. Yeah, and I and I agree with you on that. And I

00:21:47.300 think that actually transitions well into what I wanted to ask you about next, you're talking about

00:21:52.440 how this movement kind of threatens the rights and the protections of women and in particular,

00:21:59.000 lesbians. And of course, that's yet another contradiction that we see in all of this.

00:22:03.500 I've seen trans activists say that, you know, preferring someone's body or having a particular

00:22:10.520 sexual orientation, not being attracted to gender identity, but actually someone's sex,

00:22:15.980 homosexual, heterosexual, whatever, is transphobic. And so to me, this kind of leads to the eraser of

00:22:24.240 the LGB part of the LGBT. And I'm wondering if you think that as well as someone who is gay and who

00:22:32.400 has worked in this realm for a while. Mm hmm. Well, yes, I mean, this is not a wild fringe aspect of the

00:22:39.580 LGBT movement. This is on the GLAAD website. This is on the Stonewall website, which is the UK equivalent

00:22:45.640 of GLAAD or HRC. They say they have redefined sexual orientation to be an attraction to gender

00:22:56.080 identity, as if you can be attracted to an invisible thing that you can't even see for a start. But so

00:23:02.140 now a lesbian is defined by these LGBT organizations. Like, I'm not kidding. It's hard to believe. But

00:23:09.260 if you go, I could show you the pages, they define a lesbian as a person with a female gender identity

00:23:15.680 attracted to other people with female gender identities. Now, that means that a male who I

00:23:22.580 would say was heterosexual, who had no interest in in his sex, yeah, could on the basis of having a female

00:23:33.480 gender identity describe themselves and being attracted to women like females, heterosexuality,

00:23:38.500 describe themselves as a lesbian. And they are some of them. No, not everyone. I don't, you know,

00:23:44.300 I want to make clear all the way through that I'm not talking about all trans people, because actually

00:23:48.100 a lot of trans people are very worried about this, too. It's about powerful trans activist

00:23:53.460 organizations appropriating this discourse and coming up with these ideas and this language,

00:23:59.640 these language changes. So trans activists are trying to redefine what lesbianism is and what

00:24:06.380 homosexuality is and what heterosexuality is, too. But that's obviously impacting less on heterosexuals

00:24:11.340 than it is on lesbians.

00:24:12.180 Yeah. Do you see a lot of gay people speaking up about this? Because it seems like there's also a

00:24:19.200 split in the LGB community, as well as in the feminist community. There are obviously feminists

00:24:28.080 who say, yes, we have to be on board with trans rights and it doesn't threaten women. And then,

00:24:32.020 of course, there are feminists who say the opposite. And the same thing within, you know,

00:24:37.860 within the gay community saying, oh, no, we have to include the tea. This is so important for us.

00:24:42.780 And then there are people like you who say, well, hang on just a second. Let's think about the

00:24:47.000 consequences and the implications and the redefining of these things. Why isn't that more people see

00:24:54.220 this the way that you do? Partly is because they don't really know yet. I mean, there is a big

00:25:00.060 problem with getting this message out, especially in the through the newspapers and media organizations that most

00:25:07.860 you know, left leaning progressives would read. So this is I'm sure this is if anyone's watching

00:25:13.440 this, it's news to them. But also because there is kind of a loose solidarity between

00:25:20.820 lesbians and gays and trans people. And there always has been in the sense that quite a lot of

00:25:26.040 trans women started off as gay men. And also every all of us in some sense is kind of nonconforming

00:25:33.100 about gender. We don't necessarily feel like we fit in the standard issue, heterosexual,

00:25:40.600 feminine, or masculine molds. But and that's, you know, solidarity is great. But unfortunately,

00:25:48.400 the modern LGBT movement has kind of just smushed everyone together. And so there's just one kind

00:25:54.060 of thing here. And obviously, there isn't one kind of thing here. There's a lot of heterosexuality now in

00:25:59.300 the LGBT movement, where there wasn't before, right? For instance, as and then there's all the

00:26:05.680 extra thing, the add ons that are now being added, like nothing to do with sexuality to do with like,

00:26:12.000 a being a romantic, something to do with sexuality, but not the same as a sexual orientation and being

00:26:16.360 a romantic or whatever the next new thing is. So yeah, I don't know. Did that answer your question?

00:26:24.300 Yeah. What do you think the tangible consequences of that is? I'm sure that reading a definition

00:26:30.480 like that on the GLAAD website, which is something that you probably don't relate to this idea of

00:26:37.980 having a gender identity that's attracted to another gender identity. I'm sure that's not how you identify

00:26:42.480 or feel as a lesbian. When I hear words like gestator or pregnant person or chest feeding as someone who

00:26:50.460 is pregnant with my second child, I'm offended by that. And I worry about that too. I worry about

00:26:57.940 the eraser and the redefining, but sometimes I can't always put my finger on what the tangible

00:27:03.980 consequences of that kind of redefining and eraser will be for these different categories. What do you

00:27:09.360 think? Well, they're very tangible for lesbians and they have been for a while. So if you go onto a

00:27:15.280 lesbian dating site, you will see males. And I don't mean males you can't tell are females. I mean,

00:27:23.120 males you can absolutely blindingly obviously see are males that have put a bit of lipstick on,

00:27:27.500 if that. And so there's, in other words, there are now people in the dating pool calling themselves

00:27:33.800 lesbians and potentially saying you are transphobic if you will not consider me.

00:27:39.260 And now that people have to think this through. Lesbians are same sex attracted. They are not

00:27:45.520 attracted to males. There are now males calling themselves lesbians, trying to pressure them

00:27:51.860 into having sex with them. Now, again, I'm not saying this is every case, but it is a documented

00:27:57.740 phenomenon. So that's, so where that particularly bites, I think is for younger lesbians who are getting

00:28:04.320 to grips with their own sexuality. They're possibly in queer communities where they find solidarity and

00:28:10.040 friendship. You know, there's all sorts of dynamics that can go on there that can be

00:28:14.960 unhealthy, I think. So that's, that's one clear area where this narrative that someone with a beard

00:28:25.140 can be like a male with a beard can be a lesbian really is just not helping. And the other area I

00:28:30.420 think is, as I've, one I've already mentioned, which is children and their emerging understanding

00:28:35.680 of the world, which must be incredibly confused. I mean, I think we've, we're doing a kind of social

00:28:42.860 experiment here in how we tell children what the categories are, because it used to be, we could

00:28:48.600 point to certain kinds of bodies and say, most of the time that's a woman and most of the time that's

00:28:53.420 a man. And now we're just messing it all up in the name of progression. So I really would like to

00:28:58.260 know what that's doing. And of course, there's, there's evidence that within trans identified

00:29:03.420 children, um, there's, there's, um, they're statistically more likely to be, for instance,

00:29:09.300 autistic. And there's also evidence that autistic people have harder time categorizing. So there's all

00:29:15.660 sorts of extra issues there, especially if you're gay and autistic. So I, we really need to shine a light

00:29:22.420 on all of this and look at, um, it properly. And another contradiction, we've, we've talked about

00:29:38.160 these, um, throughout this episode, but, um, it's the reaffirmation that some of trans activism, um,

00:29:47.920 does of these gender stereotypes. And you kind of already touched on this, this idea of a little

00:29:54.860 boy plays with dolls, or maybe he wants to dance or do something that's out of the typical, you know,

00:30:00.440 social norm of what it means to be male, rather than just saying, okay, that's a little boy who

00:30:05.540 likes to play with dolls and that's fine. Or that's a little boy who likes pink and doesn't like to get

00:30:09.980 dirty. That's fine. That's the kind of little boy he is now parents and children, even probably,

00:30:15.660 you know, in some curriculum, um, are being taught. Well, no, that actually means that you're a girl.

00:30:21.980 So it's reaffirming these very, very strict boundaries of what it means to be a boy and a

00:30:27.080 girl in a time when it seems like self-love and self-acceptance is all the rage. We're actually

00:30:33.520 continually telling people, if you go outside of these lines at all, you're in the wrong body.

00:30:39.240 That seems so detrimental to me. It's astonishing. And I mean, again,

00:30:45.020 this is not a fringe phenomenon. This is like in the definition of gender dysphoria in the DSM,

00:30:51.480 which is the American kind of manual for, um, psychiatric diagnosis. And, you know, they talk

00:30:58.540 about what are the symptoms of, um, a gender identity disorder. One of them might be playing

00:31:04.780 with, you know, the other, other sex's toys or an attraction to certain kinds of clothing.

00:31:12.200 When you're a kid, it's fine to do all this. It's fine. Anyway, let me just say, it's absolutely

00:31:17.700 fine for men to wear dresses and makeup and self-adorn. And it's fine for women not to,

00:31:23.940 but, um, you know, when it comes to children, I just cannot believe that the psychological and

00:31:31.300 psychiatric profession have, I don't know what has happened to them. I really don't know what

00:31:36.400 has happened to them because these are not stupid people and they're not, you would think,

00:31:40.980 particularly conservative. But when it comes to this issue, I've got books which say, you know,

00:31:45.740 a child's gender identity emerges around the age of three. And, and I've, I've seen videos of,

00:31:51.540 um, gender identity therapists talking about looking for evidence in children. And like,

00:31:57.280 maybe the boy picks up a hair clip or, you know, the girl moves towards the action man and these

00:32:02.040 are signs of something inside them. It's just, it's just incredible.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - June 08, 2021

Ep 434 ｜ The Women Against Trans Activism ｜ Guest： Kathleen Stock [Part 1]

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